Wednesday, May 07, 2008

That man Campbell again

Tony Blair's former chief of spin, Alastair Campbell, may after all have sexed-up the notorious 45 minutes WMD claim when the case for invading Iraq was being made

A senior intelligence official has admitted that some of the most controversial and bitterly disputed changes to the Iraq dossier may have been made by the government's spin doctors. The revelation raises the possibility that Alastair Campbell may after all have "sexed-up" the notorious claim that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.

The admission comes in evidence to the Information Tribunal from Chris Wright, the Cabinet Office's Director, Security and Intelligence. In its ruling, published last week, the tribunal criticised the government for the absence of any audit trail showing "who drafted what" in respect of "substantial changes" to the document that took Britain to war. Wright told the tribunal that these changes may have been "made following oral comments" from the "communications professionals who were working on the dossier from a presentational point of view"...